Monday, January 9, 2017

ECOMOG’s Gambian gamble

The likely dangers of the Western African states’ attempts
to impose a solution on The Gambia

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has
resolved to send a military force (ECOMOG) into The Gambia apparently to
achieve three interrelated objectives: first to “protect” the president-elect,
Adama Barrow; second to uphold the presidential elections results that
President Yahya Jammeh has cancelled; third to ensure that Barrow is sworn in
as president. This is a big gamble that is likely to cause more problems than
it seeks to solve.

A fundamentalist movement initiated by Western nations and
supported by many elites elsewhere and in Africa has swept the world. This
movement wants democracy along Western liberal lines to prevail everywhere. It
supports the use of supra national institutions to enforce democracy where it
is faltering. There are many people in the Western world who believe genuinely
that liberal democracy should be spread across the world, even by force, as a
one-size-fits-all solution irrespective of context.

This combination of intense religiousity with a militant
faith in the application of democracy in every situation has a large cadre of
priests. This secular priesthood has come to dominate the mass media, the
academia, diplomatic corps, civil society organisations, etc. Today they
monopolise public discourse and have successfully channeled the debate to one
direction. They have drowned out alternative voices while giving the appearance
of free debate.

However, Western powers also have ulterior motives for
promoting democracy in poor countries even when they know that such efforts
often lead to disaster. . One of them is to please their domestic
constituencies. The other is that democracy offers Western powers opportunities
to infiltrate and control poor nations. It allows them to hijack the
policy-making process in poor countries so that it serves Western rather than
domestic interests.

Democracy is much more susceptible to infiltration compared
to authoritarianism. Western nations can fund opposition political parties,
mass media and NGOs (which they miscall “civil society”) to undermine poor
governments that develop nationalistic policies, which may threaten Western
interests. Therefore, the promotion of “democracy” in poor countries by Western
nations is often driven by a desire to control. Unable to see these
machinations, supra national bodies on our continent and many of our elites buy
the claims of the big powers on face value.

I believe in liberal democratic ideals. In a perfect world I
would love to see them applied everywhere. However, I am also conscious that
democracy is not an ideal that can be exported and imposed on a country or
society by force. Rather it is a practice that grows within a country or
society under very specific circumstances. Indeed the lesson we learn from
history is that democratic development grows through feats and starts. It
endures when driven by the persons directly affected by it. Democracy fails
when it is imposed from outside. Recent experiments to export democracy in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have produced disasters whose consequences
are still fresh in our minds.

Nations can change and improve their governance and need a
certain amount of time and space to do so without violent intrusions in their
internal affairs. In any case, who is ECOWAS to care more about the interests
of Gambians than the Gambian people themselves? If Gambians want Barrow as
president, let them go onto the streets and stop Jammeh from usurping their
freely expressed will. Civilians can surmount dictators as was demonstrated in
Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, Burkina Faso in October 2014 and only last week in
the Democratic Republic of Congo.

It took the Western world decades, in fact centuries, of
trial and error, feats and starts to realise the quality of democracy they have
today. If democracy works in Western countries, it is because it evolved
organically out of these societies and was shaped by myriad negotiations and
compromises between the different social forces. Therefore, attempts by Western
powers supported by the secular priesthood to promote democracy in poor
countries are actually attempts to force long-term trends to a premature
conclusion.

ECOWAS is taking a big gamble to try and impose democracy on
Gambia by force. It will most likely be easy for ECOMOG forces to defeat the
Gambian army, which seems to support Jammeh. But like the Americans have
discovered in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, defeating a dictator is easy but
creating lasting peace, leave alone a functional democratic system, is a whole
different ballgame. Therefore, ECOMOG could ignite a civil war that may last
years and leave wounds that are difficult to heal.

This is not the first time ECOWAS is trying to impose a
solution on a member state. In 1990, Charles Taylor was on the verge of
capturing power in Liberia when that body intervened through ECOMOG to enforce
a solution. This prolonged the civil war by 13 years and left the country
almost destroyed. As I have argued before, the best solution for Liberia at the
time would have been to leave (or even help) Taylor who was strong, capture
power.

I have utmost confidence in the people of Gambia to secure
their democracy by themselves. This may not happen today or tomorrow. But we
need to avoid the temptation of thinking we can solve Africa’s problems with
theoretical quick fixes. Left alone Gambians are best placed to shape the
compromises that will ensure durable democratic practice. Foreign military
intervention to force Barrow into power will undermine the necessary internal
political negotiations that allow democracy to grow and consolidate.

Instead, foreign forces will create an artificial scenario
where the defeated feel they have been removed from power by foreign interests
and may feel alienated from the political process and launch a civil war or
wait until foreign armies leave for them to begin a war. Meanwhile, victorious
political players, knowing where their bread is battered, will now depend on
foreign military force for their political survival. This will undermine their
incentives to seek internal political compromise and social integration.

I pray and hope that my predictions on Gambia don’t
materialise because future generations of Gambians will be happy that I was
wrong. I predicted for Libya in 2011that NATO airstrikes would certainly remove
Muammar Gadaffi but the result would be neither a stable government nor a
functional democracy. Instead, I predicted anarchy. Libya today is a mosaic of
small fiefdoms ruled by belligerent warlords. Please ECOWAS, do not allow your
fantastical theories to lead you to actions likely to create another Libya in
The Gambia